Chris Cottom lives near Macclesfield, UK. His winning entry in the Off the Rails 3 Minute Story Competition was read aloud to passengers on the Esk Valley Railway between Middlesbrough and Whitby. He’s packed Christmas hampers in a Harrods basement, sold airtime for Radio Luxembourg, and served a twelve-year stretch as an insurance copywriter. He liked the writing job best.
Bluesky: @chriscottom.bsky.social
Website: chriscottom.wixsite.com/chriscottom
If you aren’t familiar with his work, here’s one of his pieces to start things off:
My Lover is an Airmail Envelope (Chris Cottom | Flash Flood)
Why I like it (MK): The tone of voice in this piece is glorious. One thing I always admire in Chris’s writing is the ability to marry together the humorous and the lyrical. We start with the former - “My lover is the colour of springtime sky, bordered in pillar-box red and Oxford blue” - then a lovely shift into the more humorous - “I’m no Miss Chaste of Paperchase. I’ve been besotted with Basildon Bonds and manhandled by buff manillas.” The humour here is sound-based - internal rhyme, alliteration - so much skill to how that’s captured on the page. I also love how there’s so much character and narrative exploration within the extended metaphor.
Zoo (Jeff Landon | New Flash Fiction Review)
Why I like it (CC): Who can resist gentle-giant Jude? He’s mock tough but vulnerable; in love with his ‘genius’ caretaker, Sookie; and both viciously dismissive and sweetly protective. Landon has spoken about mixing humour and pathos, and ‘Zoo’ is a sublime example. After softening us up with line after line that’s laugh-out-loud funny, he socks us in the guts with a ‘last day of summer’ closing section of gorilla-strength sadness.
Hemiboreal (Elsa Nekola | The Cincinnati Review)
Why I like it: The setting! The sensory detail! I love the way the author forces us to reset our perspective after the interruptive ‘when we were still married’. I love the concluding sense of acceptance, how the narrator draws comfort from remaining in a place that’s bigger than any relationship, a place that, through its privations, had sustained their ‘slapped-together’ marriage. I love that the piece is addressed, without rancour, to the partner who left.
Abbreviated Glossary (Gay Degani | originally published in Melusine | republished by Kathy Fish)
Why I like it: The sub-headings! How they do so much work! The white space that invites us so deeply into the story. This was probably the first time I read a piece of short fiction with sub-headings, and it knocked me out. The link that directed me to the piece referred to it as ‘a classic’, so it had a reputation to live up to. Which of course it did, big time, moving from sensuality to double-whammy heartbreak in only 150 words.
PROMPT: Write a piece with one-word sub-headings. Make sure they work really hard. Set yourself a constraint for each section, like no more than three lines. Or two.
On the Line (Meghan Phillips | matchbook)
Why I like it: How the homey opening details both establish the period perfectly and set up the danger. How the narrator doesn’t tell us who she is, but reveals her emotions through her actions and thoughts. How there’s only one line of dialogue and it’s from the lineman, adding to the distance and poignancy. How we sense the protagonist’s loneliness long before she tells us. How the only connection she can make with her absent lineman is through being lonely too.
Your Life as a Bottle (Sarah Freligh | Pithead Chapel)
Why I like it: How it’s both breathtakingly concise (six sentences, 168 words) and incredibly detailed. How we learn all we need to know about the second-person narrator through the way she copes with ‘the cute girls with good teeth and cleavage’ and the way she heads to a bar to drink herself pretty; how, for all her reliance on bottles, there’s a glimpse of the little girl she must once have been as she ‘marries’ her ketchups ‘in a little ceremony’; how the closing sentence delivers the title.
Roll and Curl (Ingrid Jendrzejewski | Bath Flash Fiction)
Why I like it: I love this glimpse of small-town America; how the story isn’t about news of a death, but a moment before that; how the bossy narrator lets her customer laugh a little longer, have three more minutes to enjoy the familiar ‘spring rain’ of the hairspray. I love the compassion in the final two sentences, how we leave the story early, knowing the narrator isn’t just handing Mrs Philips some tissues, but helping her to retain some dignity through what’s about to happen.
PROMPT: Set your story in a shop or other high-street outlet. Show us the humanity behind the pat ‘have a nice day’ phrases scripted by head office. Show us some customer care with real heart.
An Alternate Theory Regarding Natural Disasters, as Posited by the Teenage Girls of Clove County, Kansas (Myna Chang | Bending Genres)
Why I like it: The juxtaposition of the tornado with the ennui of the collective narrators, expressed through no less than seventeen verbs in the first two paragraphs, starting in medias res with ‘ripped’, ‘peeling’, ‘powdering’, before slowing right down to ‘shimmered’, ‘assess’, ‘sipping’. The specificity, the fabulous proper nouns: ‘Crystal Toynbee’, ‘the Two Dudes Enchilada Hut’. The repeated ‘It was the summer’. The tornado-like structure: fast, swirling beginning, circular ending.
Pantoum for 1979 (Brenda Miller | Short Reads)
Why I like it: I’d never heard of pantoums until I took a (wonderful) Sarah Freligh course in 2024. The advance-and-retreat structure completely blew me away. I printed it and used highlighters to mark the repeated or near-repeated phrases. The form is, as Miller has observed, ‘perfect for topics that are rather obsessive’, like this young narrator moving to a house where ravens will wake her up, where Francisco will touch her ‘just once on the hip’, where she’ll bake ‘loaves and loaves of bread’.
Prompt: Go on, try it. A piece with four-sentence paragraphs in which you echo the second and fourth sentences of one paragraph in the first and third sentences of the next. Warning: it’s obsessive.
The Meat Ration (Kate Horsley | The Cincinnati Review)
Why I like it: How the opening emotional bleakness matches the setting, with its marram grass like an ‘unruly beard’; how the ersatz food evokes the drab colours of wartime austerity; how Hilda appears horribly pragmatic in the way she acquires better fare for her son’s birthday. The story would be complete in just two paragraphs, but Horsley goes further, twisting the knife, conjuring Frank back from the sea, his love dissolving in the reality of what ‘making-do’ means in practice for his widow.
A Poet Rejuvenates The Parts Other Treatments Cannot Reach (Caroline Greene | Free Flash Fiction)
Why I like it: Because it captivated me immediately with its edition of Keats ‘brindled with notes’ in a ‘long-ago teenage scrawl’. Because it’s a sensory feast, rich in both descriptive power and emotional resonance, from the opening ‘sardonic smile’ to the ‘edge of undiscovered lands’ and back to ‘the girl-next-door’, mirroring Keats’s own love life as well as his ‘search for fellow poets hidden in the hills’. Because I absolutely loved the exultant triple ‘Yes’ of its glorious conclusion.
What did you think of these choices? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments - have you found a new favourite piece? Did you try out one of the prompts?
Next month’s selection will be chosen by Jenny Wong and will be appearing (fingers crossed) on the 15th July.
Opportunities to work with Matt
UNIQUE SELLING POINTS (workshop): 5th July 2025,09:00-10:30 BST (open for bookings)
BEYOND THESE SHORES (panel discussion): 5th August 2025,19:00-20:30 BST (open for bookings)
COLOURFUL CHARACTERS: 4th-17th August 2025 (open for bookings)
I HEAR VOICES (workshop): 2nd September 2025,19:00-20:30 BST (open for bookings)
I HEAR VOICES (workshop): 6th September 2025,09:00-10:30 BST (open for bookings)
GLORIOUS WORDS: 8th-21st September 2025 (open for bookings)
GO WITH THE FLOW: 13th-26th October 2025 (email me on matt@mattkendrick.co.uk to get your name on the priority list)
LYRICAL WRITING: 10th-23rd November 2025 (email me on matt@mattkendrick.co.uk to get your name on the priority list)
Editing
NOVEL / NOVELLA EDITING: First steps review / structural review / line edit / submission review
EDITING FOR COLLECTIONS: Structural overview report / line edit
SHORT FICTION EDITING: Structural review / line edit / detailed edit